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The 'Big Ear' Gone Deaf

The most important person investigating the failure of our intelligence community to anticipate the attack by Al Qaeda is someone you never heard of.

Her name is Eleanor Hill. Ten days ago she took up her duties as staff director of the Joint Inquiry Committee Into 9/11/2001. This assembles leaders of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (''Hipsi'') and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (''Sissi''). The new committee, with its freshly hired and cleared staff of nearly 30, does not yet have a nickname.

Ms. Hill was a Florida prosecutor and later partner at King & Spaulding. She served for a decade as counsel to Senator Sam Nunn's subcommittee on investigations, and during the Clinton years as inspector general in the Department of Defense.

The original choice to head the 9/11 inquiry was L. Britt Snider, who had been George Tenet's inspector general at Langley. Tenet had been the staff chief at Sissi (this column is being written in spookspeak -- Langley is C.I.A. headquarters, and Sissi you know) and some senators worried that putting Tenet's man at the head of the investigation guaranteed a whitewash of the C.I.A. and all blame dumped on the F.B.I.

An early indication of Ms. Hill's seriousness is the attention being paid to the National Security Agency, based at Fort Meade, Md. Its worldwide eavesdropping facilities used to be known as the Big Ear, because the 38,000 N.S.A. employees, with their $7 billion budget, listen in on communications around the world.

In theory, the N.S.A. then provides C.I.A. analysts with up-to-the-minute skinny on what terrorists tell each other on their cellphones. But the Big Ear is going deaf.

It's bad enough that readily available encryption technology and fiber-optic cables often make N.S.A. techniques of interception obsolescent. Worse is that Osama bin Laden started substituting human messengers for cellphone calls four years ago.

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Worst of all, the N.S.A. will soon be revealed to be a huge vacuum cleaner aimed to listen to or look at key words but with no way to go through most of the millions of communications it does collect every day.

Hold your hand as high as you can above your head to indicate how much data our present system collects. Then drop your hand to your knee -- that's how much gets translated into English. Then point at your ankle: that's how much goes to our intelligence analysts at the C.I.A. in time to be useful. As far as F.B.I. counterintelligence in the U.S. is concerned, that's in your little toe.

As a result of the joint inquiry's hearings in coming weeks, we will learn of messages swooshed up by the N.S.A. in the weeks before Sept. 11 that were not translated, or not analyzed at the C.I.A. or sent to the F.B.I. If our intelligence ''community'' had been as coordinated as it should have been, terrorists might well have been headed off.

How do we use this hindsight to gain foresight? Neither by leak warfare among scared bureaucracies nor by their triumphant seizures of incoming hoodlums accused of ''planning'' to build a panic bomb. Publicity about how great we are now is being used to overwhelm publicity about how dismal we were last year.

Congress and the White House cannot escape the need for a commission to investigate failures and recommend wholesale changes. Even if legislated and appointed now, it will not be up and running with needed clearances for months. That's why responsibility falls on the joint inquiry to gather information now while the trail is relatively fresh -- to be turned over to the group charged with revamping our intelligence.

One of the ultimate commission's tasks will be to find out why the oversight by Congress was so abysmal. Hipsi and Sissi won't like that, nor will judiciary committees that slept through Justice's ineptitude. But if we are to bolster our protection, we must use the evidence being gathered by Ms. Hill and company to shake up the whole system.